Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday April 13, 2006 @11:47AM
from the m-m-o-arrr-p-g dept.

Gamasutra reports on an update to the Pirates of the Carribean MMOG currently in the works at Disney. The current plan is for a 2007 release, with some teasers and information upcoming at this year's E3. From the article: "The game will allow players to interact with movie characters such as Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, as well as allowing users to create their own custom pirate avatar, form a crew and captain a ship."

But why?its not like the tech doesnt exist to log time spent in game. If I fancy playing Eve online an hour a month its $12/ hour. If I play it 5 hours a days thats... errrunder 10 cents an hour.That excludes causal gamers and just appeals to the hardcore. Its a business mistake if you ask me.At the very least have stepped plans, a hardcore plan for $15 a month unlimited, and a casual plan for maybe 1hr/day for half the price.

Hm, granted that aside from Toontown, Disney computer games (and movie computer games) generally suck, but perhaps this will light an unpleasant fire under the crew behind http://www.burningsea.com/ [burningsea.com] (Pirates of the Burning Sea) ANOTHER pirate MMOG that's been in development forever.

Ironic, how these things with multi-year development times all seem to come out at once....WW2 games (jillions of them), Space 4x games (nothing for a long time, then GalCiv and MOO3 like the same week), now pirate games.

Look at most games from a movie franchise, outside of Star Wars and you see the games die or dont do well. Matrix is the biggest one, but even Star Trek (lack of new series/episodes). I have a feeling there may be a big interest, but once the hype is over, I see everyone going back to WoW or whatever the next WoW is.

I have been playing the new Pirates! on xbox recently, and thought an MMOG would be a great fit, where the important jobs (governor, friar, captain of the gaurd, so forth) could be held in a meaningful way by players, leading to a competetive social structure without repetetive NPCs.

One of the ONLY games I have ever walked away from was Pirates of the Caribbean. It violated almost every HSI rule out there: obtuse item manipulation tools, poor indications of possible problems, ambiguous cause/effect rules, etc.

i think i read that the PotC game that came out with the movie was just a generic pirate game that was already scheduled to come out, Disney bought it quickly as a cheap tie-in to the moviehow would you like to be THAT developer?"Well guys, our budget pirate game is almost ready, we're looking at 19.99 price point with a - *RING RING* - oh, hold on.... uh-huh... yeah..... wait, who!?! WHAT! you wanna..... us?!?!?! THANKS! okay everyone, change of plans, we're now a 49.99 triple-A title with a major Disney m

The sad thing is that it was supposed to be the sequel to a game that was actually really good, Sea Dogs. The publisher in question is Bethesda Softworks, the guys behind that game that all of the geeks are currently jerking off over, Oblivion. So you can imagine how horribly disappointing the bug-ridden, unpolished Pirates of the Caribbean was.

The ToonTown guys are working on PotC and obviously their design will be informed by lessons learned there. But the subject matter is a little... darker. I bet PotC will be targeted at T for teen, and marketed mainly to 12-17 year olds.

Another MMOG based on a property that doesn't lend itself to MMOGs. AWESOME. Is Sid Meier's Pirates! that obscure that they couldn't use that property? How about this, Disney. MMOGs are not a motherfucking amusement park ride. Letting me interact with a virtual Depp or Knightly is Not Interesting. A game needs More than That.

Hollywood should not be allowed to touch games. And if that means the loss of companies like Tigon Studios and Buena Vista, so fucking be it.

And despite what people are saying, it probably will be a WoW Clone. With Boats.

WoW is based around leveling. Pirates! is not. Give me a way to test my swashbuckling skills against other people based on reflexes and strategy, not how many points I've put in minute skills and techniques.

The point is that many people are abstaining from the current MMOs because they're too similar and not trying new systems of gameplay. The leveling treadmill is a big turnoff to many potential players. Tabula Rasa is claimed to not have one so I'm interested in seeing what it has.

Hopefully this will be better than that crap first game they did. I remember thinking, "Wow this'll be like Pirates on the Commodore with good graphics and stuff!" and afterwards thinking "Wow I wish Sid Meier would finish a new Pirates game with good graphics!" I think Bethesda did it? Not sure but I remember it was a developer I'd liked before.
On a side note, I noticed the cue they're taking from the overhaul with SW:G and right now promising interaction with the main characters right away.

These pay-per-month MMORPGs will one day kill the traditional single player adventure game. When I'm trying to lose myself in a fantasy world, I don't want to run into other characters with names like commodore burrito and the like. Such things like this and people who play the game 18 hours per day and sell real world possessions in order to buy computer world items have really turned me off from MMORPGs lately.

Sorry for the rant, but I hate seeing so many good video game ideas turned into a pay-per-month-bleed-me-dry MMO deal. This is just my opinion, I'm wondering if anyone shares it, or if its time I just succumb to the MMO style of gaming and accept it as the way of the future.

"The game will allow players to interact with movie characters such as Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann..."

I feel like this another indication that many of the suits don't *get* MMOs. I don't think most MMO players care about interacting with the static characters from your franchise. For passive media that's fine, tell us more about Jack blah blah. But for interactive media, I'm less interested in your characters than I am in your world. (And is the Pirates of the Carribean world rich enough to support the demands of an MMO? I dunno.)

I feel like the City of Heroes folks have made some similar mistakes. They spend (what seems to be) a lot of time and energy documenting the ongoing activities of the main good guys (Statesman, Positron, Synapse, etc.) and the main bad guys (Lord Recluse, etc), but I don't care. In an MMO, if it's not interactive, I don't really care about it. (That's not to say that it's not important to provide a rich history for the locations in an MMO; but that history needs to be reflected in the interactive present to really have any meaning for players.)

And is the Pirates of the Carribean world rich enough to support the demands of an MMO? I dunno.

Should be. If you stretch from lower US Eastern seaboard down to, let's say, the Brazil Coastline, that's a hell of a lot of territory. The Bahamas alone boasts of over 700 islands and cays. Not to mention a quick glance at the relevant history yields dozens of famous pirates, hundreds of offical ships, towns and ports galore, not to mention a plethora of history, even if you're willing to slice it thin (sa

That's what they said before World of Warcraft came out. It's got over five million accounts, and hasn't particularly affected the subscription rates of other games in the genre.

It's not like this is Yet Another Fantasy MMOG-- its gimmick hasn't been attempted before, save by Puzzle Pirates (which really can't be compared outside of the similarities in theme) and Pirates of the Burning Seas (which is still in development Hell). It will sink or swim on its own merits, not because of market oversaturation.